Fans pick 100 books like Nobody Knows My Name

This book is about the most horrifying loss imaginable: the author loses her parents, her husband, and her two young sons all at once, in the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the day after Christmas, 2004. She and her family were spending the holiday in Sri Lanka when the wave hit and overtook the jeep in which they were attempting to flee. I can’t come up with a better justification for suicide than this—she’s lost everyone; she wonders why she was spared, just to suffer these losses every minute of every hour of every day. The book is both a horror story and a testament to human strength. I assure you, you won’t be able to put it down. 

This was by far the most essential book in supporting my healing. Reading it at age 45, eight years into my recovery, so many times Herman described the exact thing I was either going through or had to go through to recover.

Explaining that being abused in a family was like being a prisoner of war blew my mind. Like a POW, seven-year-old me couldn’t escape. She helped explain so much of my trauma, my reactions, and my struggle and gave me a mountain of hope to climb!

Filmmaker Rithy Panh does not like the word trauma. He prefers to describe the after-effects of what happened to his Cambodian family as “an unending desolation.” Ever since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979 and he survived as a teenager, he has not stopped thinking about his family and trying to understand Comrade Duch, a man Rithy regards as “The Commandant of the Killing Fields." Mao and Stalin, Nazism and the Nurenberg Trials, and The Hague all hover at the edges of Rithy’s consciousness. He describes dispossession; dehumanization beginning with the annulment of names; demonization of education and traditional notions of culture; deportation;  slow starvation; corruption; terror; torture and language itself. Rithy Panh is a documentary filmmaker and reading The Elimination is an act of witness by both writer and reader. 

A Wolf in the Attic by Sophia Richman is a book written by a psychotherapist who was hidden in an attic in Poland as a Jewish child during the second world war. She describes this experience (she was told to never utter a sound) as well as its impact on her relationship with her parents and her life after the war in Paris and then in New York City. She maintained her reluctance to speak in public until very late in life and this book is a kind of coming out for what is now known as a “hidden child” or “child survivor.” I found it fascinating to read how a psychologist analyzes her own childhood and the life choices she makes as an adult.

Walter White served as the executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1931 until his death in 1955. A light-skinned Black man often mistaken for white, he used his appearance to infiltrate the white-supremacy power structure and then work for civil rights.

In his evocative autobiography, A Man Called White, White recounts how in 1941 he and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph pushed President Franklin Roosevelt to take a major step forward in the struggle for civil rights – creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). It’s a gripping tale about an often-overlooked part of the civil rights movement

The FEPC worked to desegregate the war industries, a mission that reshaped American politics and set the Democratic Party on the path of becoming the party of civil rights.

Delmont’s sweeping story about the complex wartime outlooks and experiences of Black Americans necessarily includes the travails and triumphs of combat fighters; the battlefield contributions of Black GIs have been too often dismissed or ignored. 

But here they appear alongside a fascinating, broader cast of war workers battling racism while doing their bit to defeat the Axis across the world’s continents. From the engineers carving roads out of impenetrable Asian jungle or Alaskan tundra to the women of the all-Black 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion who sorted mail in an unheated English warehouse while under bombardment, Delmont’s subjects offer a reminder of the awesome scope of this war.

What I found most rewarding about this book by Wilma King is the way she widened the research net to include the ways women communicated with each other through diaries, letters, and various church records. This makes sense and creates tremendous value because newspaper reporters of this period weren’t knocking on the doors of Maria Stewart or other black female leaders for their opinions.

Thanks to King's diligent work, I got a much better sense of the important role these underrepresented women played in the antislavery and early civil rights movement.

This next one hit me like a freight train. James Baldwin’s words are as powerful now as they were back then. I’ve read it twice, and every time, it hits me in a new way. His perspective on race, his life in Harlem, and that unforgettable moment when he talks about his chains falling off—I felt that in my soul.

Baldwin doesn’t just talk about race; he lives it, breathes it, and gives you the truth straight up. This book is everything we need to hear, now more than ever.

Growing up in a community of color where police harassment and brutality is the norm, Khan-Cullors learns early in life about racial inequality. This point is reinforced when her father and her mentally ill brother cycle in and out of prison. She clearly and poignantly tells us how her hurt and outrage about the treatment of her family members expands into activism and co-founding the Black Lives Matter movement. Her struggles to build a loving, supportive community around her as she challenges racial violence and unequal justice show her enormous personal and political challenges. The message, she writes, of “building power and ensuring healing” teaches me how important it is to balance the two.

When I was twelve, my father said to me, “Stick and stones might break your bones, but words will never hurt you. You are going to a white school.” It was with those words that I became a part of a complicated integration plan called “Freedom of Choice.” Connie Curry, one of the first white members of SNCC, the student-run civil rights activist group, writes beautifully of the Carter family as they integrate the schools of Sunflower County, Mississippi. The book emphasizes that access to education was a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement. The Carter children learned, as I did, that words can both hurt and heal.